When I saw this tutorial by Yes I’m a Designer, I knew I had to add this technique to my list-o-skills. I also made some slight modifications to it because I went entirely from memory after having watched it a couple of days ago.
The concept is very simple: Stretch the pixels on the outer most edge of the image. This is best done with a figure that’s performing an action. Say, a runner, figure skater, baseball pitcher, or in my case, a football player. The effect conveys motion or speed but it also just looks interesting. If your action is moving (your) left to right you’ll want to get the pixels on the left edge and vice versa. You’ll see what I mean.
There are so many ways to vary this effect to ones liking and I did that a tad but I tried to stay fairly close to what I learned in the tutorial.
The steps are very straight forward:
- Find a good action shot that can be silhouetted/masked.
- Duplicate the subject as many times as needed to get a good single-pixel vertical cross-section.
- Stretch this cross-section to fill the canvas left to right and set that layer as a Smart Object.
- Use transform/warp to manipulate the layer to your liking making sure that the edge lines up with the stretched cross-section.
- Do whatever else you like to stylize it.
Here’s how my first go turned out. Quick disclaimer: I’m a Falcons fan but Marshawn Lynch here was the first “football player running” that Google presented to me. So he beat everyone to the punch!
Anyway, it’s a nice pic and it’s a high-resolution photo. It was also already transparent so, I was able to skip a step! You could do this with any pic though, just mask the background out.
There is a section where I used some creative license. His left arm has the stretch going outward but, it’s also extending in toward his body. I tried to stretch the uniform to his arm but it just looked weird. So, I left it alone and went back to having it just be the color tone from his arm. You can literally work on something like this for hours if you wanted. Here’s an example of the duplication process, the cross-section, and the stretching. Here’s the original file I worked from.
